Liberation
Opening Night: October 28, 2025
Theater: James Earl Jones Theatre
Website: liberationbway.com
1970s, Ohio. Lizzie gathers a group of women to talk about changing their lives, and the world. What follows is a necessary, messy, and bitingly funny exploration of what it means to be free, and to be a woman. In LIBERATION, Lizzie’s daughter steps into her mother’s memory—into the unfinished revolution she once helped ignite—and searches the past to find the answer for herself.
BUY TICKETSREAD THE REVIEWS:
October 28, 2025
If there is a show that can make the case for a Tony Award for best ensemble, it’s this one. White directs the actors like a conductor leading an orchestra: Each one gets to shine in at least one aria (or speech, in this case), but they also function as a multifaceted single organism onstage. When these women talk, we want to hear every word.
READ THE REVIEW
October 28, 2025
Since seeing it earlier this year, I’ve found myself mentally comparing everything else onstage to Liberation, and frankly, not many other shows compare. Liberation is a must see.
READ THE REVIEW
October 28, 2025
Both times I’ve seen the play—Off Broadway this spring, now returning in a larger space on Broadway—I’ve felt unprepared for the emotional wallop it lands, the way that Wohl’s work becomes cosmically immense without leaving that gym basement. I think it gets there by staying so focused on the quietly radical thing these women are doing with each other, and which Wohl is making the rest of the audience engage in. Maybe you should be scared, because listening could change you too.
READ THE REVIEW
October 28, 2025
“Liberation” is a brilliant, well-acted, and sobering account of the women’s rights movement, complicity, and the lens through which we view our caretakers — namely, our mothers.
READ THE REVIEW
October 28, 2025
When Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” opened Off Broadway all the way back in February, it would have been ridiculous to grace it with best-of superlatives. Now that “Liberation” has opened on Broadway this Tuesday at the James Earl Jones Theatre, it’s entirely apt to write that it’s the year’s best play. There are only a few other new plays to open in 2025 and I’ve seen most of them in previews. Bank on it: “Liberation” remains the best.
READ THE REVIEW
October 28, 2025
Whitney White’s direction elicits a triumph of ensemble acting whose equipoise is a perfect realization of the play’s own themes. The actors work so well together, and so unselfishly, that it seems absurd to single any of them out.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 28, 2025
While Wohl’s script is packed to the brim with thoughtful moments of beauty, comedy, and heartbreak, Liberation wouldn’t be nearly as affecting and, sadly, relatable without its stellar cast…Their performances are bolstered by director Whitney White, who leads with a steady hand having previously shepherded another equally strong ensemble in the Tony-nominated play Jaja’s African Hair Salon.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 28, 2025
There is something different about Liberation’s Broadway production. Bess Wohl’s play still features the same tight ensemble as in its Off-Broadway premiere earlier this year, and it is still directed by the unstoppable Whitney White. It still sings and soars in Act 1 and then punches you in the gut in Act 2. And it is still essential theatregoing this Broadway season.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 28, 2025
Liberation, which premiered off-Broadway earlier this year, is a welcome original play on Broadway that relies not on marquee Hollywood names for buzz but a slate of strong performances, which elevate a first act that seems, like its narrator, a bit too eager to give the answer.
READ THE REVIEW
October 28, 2025
Wohl’s ensemble drama is a memory play about a social movement, full of arguments that will ring familiar to many. But it’s rooted in vibrant, complex characters who embody the individual stakes entangled behind efforts at solidarity.
READ THE REVIEW
October 28, 2025
The play speaks to itself, it speaks to us, and it encourages a dialogue straight back at it. In this sense, it is its own highly effective consciousness-raising exercise, looking at us in our present day where the principles of equality and progress are becoming derided and imperiled. What the women thought they were confronting and vanquishing in the early 1970s remains all too prescient.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 28, 2025
The other great strength of “Liberation” is the potency and humanity of its characters, even if Lizzie struggles to shut up long enough to let them talk. All are adroitly performed under Whitney White‘s direction. If there were a Tony Award for best ensemble, it would be wrapped up now by Betsy Aidem, Audrey Corsa, Kayla Davion, Irene Sofia Lucio and Adina Verson, as well as the aforementioned.
READ THE REVIEW
October 28, 2025
“Liberation” is not an easy play. It’s demanding, ambitious, and intentionally messy. Some of its observations, such as the suggestion that marriage and motherhood can erase one’s sense of self, remain deeply relatable and unsettling. It offers no answers, only more debate. At a time when the idea of progress feels fragile, Wohl’s play insists that the search for freedom, whether personal or political, is never finished.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 28, 2025
So much of Liberation—Wohl’s best play, and she’s had some excellent ones, including Small Mouth Sounds and Make Believe—feels like a radical act. This sensational cast, all in top form.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 28, 2025
Wohl is a wonderfully intuitive writer who listens to her characters… The result is a thoroughly honest portrait of a group of women who sought to change the world and came up short. As impressive as the cast was in that earlier production, the women — and a guy — are even better now. And each of them seems so fully invested in their roles, we forget they’re acting. That is the highest praise I could offer.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 28, 2025
Much of the strength of the production, which has moved intact from its Off-Broadway run earlier this year, resides in the ensemble acting, theater regulars portraying everyday women with grace and good humor.
READ THE REVIEW
October 30, 2025
All of the performances are terrific, perfectly pitched by director Whitney White, and the actresses click formidably as a unit. However, as individuals, Susan, Isadora, Celeste and Dora are there, in large part, to deliver punchlines and illustrate points. Two characters are miles more involving than the rest. The soul of “Liberation” belongs to Margie and Lizzie.
READ THE REVIEW
November 7, 2025
In Bess Wohl’s galvanizing show of the hour “Liberation,” directed by Whitney White, the women in a nineteen-seventies consciousness-raising group wrestle with questions political (should they join a general strike?) and personal (can they celebrate their own naked bodies?) while building solidarity and coalition. Susannah Flood, in the role of a lifetime, addresses us directly, playing both Wohl’s avatar and Lizzie, a fictionalized version of Wohl’s own mother.
READ THE REVIEW